An IETF repository for working code in our protocols?

[Vijay Gurbani <[e-mail]>]

All: I was reviewing a draft [1] as part of Gen-ART.  In the draft, there
is a section pertaining to "Implementation Status" as dictated by RFC
7942.  I found this section to be very interesting in that it captures the
running code corresponding to the I-D, but RFC 7942 does not appear to
provide the means to retain this section upon publication as a RFC.  (To be
sure, it does not mandate that the section be removed, just suggests it.
However, most I-D authors simply will end up asking the RFC editor to
remove the section, as [1] does.)

I think that is rather counter productive.  After all, we standardize
protocols so that others can write programs that implement the protocols,
and I see a lot of value in preserving any running code.  In the particular
case of the I-D I reviewed, there were two implementations, both from
reputable organizations (APNIC and the Italian National Research Council).
By simply deleting the "Implementation Status" section when the I-D was
published as an RFC, it seems that good, quality implementations that folks
spent time on would be lost, perhaps not irrevocably, but for most
practical purposes, the code would be orphaned.

I am wondering whether the IETF should preserve some of this running code
as an archive.  The IETF makes no guarantees of the correctness of the
code, just provides a repository where code can be linked to a particular
RFC to allow implementers to bootstrap themselves, if needed.  This
repository will also contain the contact of the original author of the
code.  The repository is sort of like an IANA registry of IETF working code
corresponding to an RFC.  The authors of the I-D can be the "expert" and
suggest which implementations they consider worthy of archival.  The
boilerplate of implementations is given in Section 2 of RFC 7942 [2].  We
would have to spec out an IANA-registry like process to do so, but I think
that the ends will justify the means.

I note that organizations like IEEE have evolved to provide a repository
where authors of published papers can park their datasets for
reproducibility (see IEEE DataPort [3]).  The 2017 ACM Task Force on Data,
Software, and Reproducibility in Publication also recommended that, "The
ACM Digital Library will need to interoperate with a number of recommended
data repositories and software curation platforms..." [4].  So this idea of
the IETF maintaining a software repository is not entirely unheard of.

I apologize for taking your time if this has been discussed before; if not,
it is worth some discussion.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-regext-rdap-sorting-and-paging-15
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7942
[3] https://bigdata.ieee.org/ieee-dataport
[4]
https://www.acm.org/publications/task-force-on-data-software-and-reproducibility

Thank you,

- vijay